1. Mission

The telephone was invented in the 1870s by Elisha Gray and
Alexander Graham Bell, and continues to be a very important means
for us to communicate with each other. The Web by comparison is
very recent, but has rapidly become a competing communications
channel. The convergence of telecommunications and the Web is
now bringing the benefits of Web technology to the telephone,
enabling Web developers to create applications that can be
accessed via any telephone, and allowing people to interact with
these applications via speech and telephone keypads. The W3C
Speech Interface Framework is a suite of markup specifications
aimed at realizing this goal. It covers voice dialogs, speech
synthesis, speech recognition, telephony call control for voice
browsers and other requirements for interactive voice response
applications, including use by people with hearing or speaking
impairments.

Some possible applications include:

Accessing business information, including the corporate "front desk"
asking callers who or what they want, automated telephone ordering
services, support desks, order tracking, airline arrival and departure
information, cinema and theater booking services, and home banking
services.

Accessing public information, including community information such as
weather, traffic conditions, school closures, directions and events;
local, national and international news; national and international stock
market information; and business and e-commerce transactions.

Assisting the user to communicate with other people via sending and
receiving voice-mail and email messages.

2. Target Audience

The Voice Browser Working Group should be of interest to a
wide range of organizations involved in the design, support
and infrastructure for interactive voice response applications.
These include companies providing call center solutions, speech
techologies, and application design and hosting services.

3. Context

The Voice Browser Working Group was first established on 26
March 1999 and subsequently rechartered on 25 September 2002.
The Working Group is now being re-chartered for a further two
years to continue its work on maintaining and enhancing the
W3C Speech Interface Framework suite of specifications.

4. Scope

All work items carried out under this Charter must fall
within the scope defined by this section.

VoiceXML 2.x

Maintenance of VoiceXML 2.0, and continued work on incremental
releases including VoiceXML 2.1 that provide backwards compatibility
with 2.0.

VoiceXML 3.0

VoiceXML 3.0 is the next major release of VoiceXML.
Its purpose is to provide powerful dialog capabilities that can be
used to build advanced speech applications, and to provide these
capabilities in a form that can be easily and cleanly integrated with
other W3C languages. It will provide enhancements to existing dialog
and media control, as well as major new features (e.g. modularization,
a cleaner separation between data/flow/dialog, and asynchronous
external eventing) to facilitate interoperation with external
applications and media components.

Speech synthesis and aural prompts

Work is expected on the maintenance of SSML 1.0 and on
incremental releases including the say-as mechanism, and
features for more expressive speech. Continued collaboration is
expected with the W3C Cascading Style
Sheets Activity on CSS support for speech synthesis.

Speech recognition grammars

This covers context free grammars and statistical models
of speech, together with DTMF input. Work is
expected on the maintenance of SRGS 1.0 and incremental releases,
as well as a resumption of work on N-Gram models.

Pronunciation lexicons

These provide the basis for describing pronunciation information
for use in speech recognition and synthesis, for use in tuning
applications, e.g. for proper names that have irregular
pronunciations.

Semantic interpretation for speech recognition

This describes annotations to grammar rules for extracting
the semantic results from recognition, either as XML or as a value
that can be held in an ECMAScript variable. The target for the XML
output is EMMA (Extensible Multimodal
Annotation Markup Language) which is being developed in the W3C
Multimodal Interaction Activity.

Telephony call control for voice browsers

Driving CCXML 1.0 through to Recommendation status, followed
by maintenance and work on incremental releases.

5. Deliverables and Schedule

This Working Group is chartered to last until 31 January 2007.
The first face to face meeting after re-chartering is planned to
be held during the Boston W3C Technical Plenary in early 2005.

Here is a list of milestones identified at the time of
re-chartering. Others may be added later at the discretion
of the Working Group, provided they fall within the scope
as described in section 4. The dates
are for guidance only and subject to change.

VoiceXML 2.1

Candidate Recommendation, February 2005

Recommendation, June 2005

VoiceXML 3.0

1st Working Draft, June 2005

Last Call Working Draft, March 2006

Candidate Recommendation, December 2006

Recommendation, June 2007

Pronunciation Lexicon

1st Working Draft, March 2005

Last Call Working Draft, July 2005

Candidate Recommendation, December 2005

Recommendation, April 2006

Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition

Candidate Recommendation, March 2005

Recommendation, December 2005

Voice Browser Call Control: CCXML 1.0

Candidate Recommendation, April 2005

Recommendation, December 2005

6. Relationship with other activities

These are related activities that we may need to interact
with in ways to be determined, for example, to ask them to review
our draft specifications, and for us to take advantage of
their work to fulfil our needs. Collaboration across working
groups will be essential to realizing the
mission of the Voice Browser Activity.

6.1 W3C-related activities

These are W3C activities that may be asked to review documents
produced by the Voice Browser Working Group, or which may be
involved in closer collaboration as appropriate to achieving the
goals of the Charter.

7. Membership, Meetings, and Logistics

To become a participant of the Working Group, a representative of
a W3C Member organization must be nominated by their Advisory Committee
Representative as described in the W3C Process. The
associated IPR disclosure must further satisfy the
requirements specified in the W3C
Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version).

Experts from appropriate communities may also be invited to join the
working group, following the provisions for this in the W3C Process.

Each Working Group participant is expected to contribute 20%, or at least
a day per week to this group.

All proceedings of the Working Group (mail archives, telecon minutes, ftf
minutes) will be available to W3C Members.

Working Group participants are not obligated to participate in every work
item, however the Working Group as a whole is responsible for reviewing and
accepting all work items.

7.1 Email communication

Certain topics need coordination with external groups. The
Chair and the Working Group can agree to discuss these topics on
a public mailing list. The archived
mailing list www-voice@w3.org
is used for public discussion of W3C proposals for Voice
Browsers, and Working Group members are encouraged to
subscribe. To subscribe send a message with the word subscribe in
the subject line to www-voice-request@w3.org.

7.2 Group home page

The Working Group page
will record the history of the group, provides access to the archives,
meeting minutes, updated schedule of deliverables, membership list,
and relevant documents and resources. The page will be available to
W3C Members and Invited Experts, and will be maintained by the W3C
team contacts in collaboration with the Working Group Chair.

7.3 Telephone meetings

A weekly one-hour phone conference will be held. The exact
details, dates and times will be published in advance on the working
group page. Additional phone conferences may be scheduled as necessary
on specific topics. An IRC channel may be used to supplement
teleconferences. Meeting records should be made available in a
timely fashion, in accordance with the W3C Process.

7.4 Face-to-face meetings

Face to face meetings will be arranged 3 to 4 times a year.
The Chair will make Working Group meeting dates and locations
available to the group in a timely manner according to the W3C Process.
The Chair is also responsible for providing publicly accessible
summaries of Working Group face to face meetings, which will be
announced on www-voice@w3.org.

8. Resources

8.1 Working Group participation

This is expected to be a large working group. At the end of
the previous charter, the Working Group had 88 participants from
47 organizations. To make effective use of this number of people,
work may be carried out in task forces following the W3C Process
"Requirements for All Working, Interest, and Coordination Groups".
We also expect a large public review group that will participate
in the public mailing list discussions.

8.2 W3C Team involvement

The W3C Team will be responsible for the mailing lists, public
and working group pages, and for liaison with the W3C communications
staff for the publication of working drafts. W3C team members are
expected to adopt the same requirements for meeting attendance,
timely response and information disclosure as are required of W3C
Members. The W3C Team expects to allocate the equivalent of 100% of
a full-time person to this work for the duration of this working
group.

9. Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C
Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version). To promote the
widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue
Recommendations that can be implemented, according to this
policy, on a Royalty-Free basis.